My first visit to New York City

Started: 2013-06-29 21:06:13

Submitted: 2013-06-29 22:33:56

Visibility: World-readable

In which the intrepid narrator digs up his old journal to recap his first trip to New York City, as a nine-year-old in 1990

In light of my
recent trip to New York City, I dug up the journal I kept on my
first trip to the city in May 1990 in search of corroborating details to
match my handful of memories from Manhattan. My parents organized a
three-week trip to the east coast in the spring of my fourth grade year,
and in exchange for getting out of school I had to, according to the
independent study contract that I still have, "Keep a journal with
pictures, pamphlets, brochures, etc relating to your trip. Daily entries
of thoughts and observations and activities." The spiral-bound notebook
is now fraying and some of the pages are falling out but it's stuffed
full of pictures, pamphlets and brochures, as well as my observations as
a nine-year-old on a family vacation to Washington, DC and New York.

We spent one week staying with friends in Brewster, Putnam County, New
York; about 60 miles north of New York City. (I see Brewster is
connected to the city via the Metro North Railroad; the peak travel time
into Grand Central is about 80 minutes. I'm glad that's not my commute.)
According to my journal, our week in New York included two days in
Manhattan.

This is my complete journal entry from Friday, 18 May 1990, the day we
drove from Silver Spring, Maryland to New York:

The handwriting is a little messy but I think it's recognizably mine. I
apparently did not see fit to mention that we drove across the George
Washington Bridge over the Hudson River into Manhattan, or that some of
the New Yorkers we talked to thought that the crossing was risky given
its proximity to Harlem.

We returned to Manhattan the following day for church. I did not, as a
nine-year-old, anticipate that, twenty-three years later, I would want
detailed geographical references to pin down my precise location in the
city. I remember a large, mostly-empty church and bright sun on the
street out front. I kept slightly better notes on our afternoon visit to
the beach on Fire Island.

Two days later, on Monday, 21 May 1990, we returned for a proper tour
of Lower Manhattan. We took the ferry to Liberty Island and I remember
climbing to the crown of the Statue of Liberty on the massive, creaking
spiral staircases in the statue's cavernous and dimly-lit torso. (My
mother tells me I was scared, but that fact is omitted from my own
memory.) I kept the National Park Service brochure from the Statue of
Liberty, which shows the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center towering
over Lower Manhattan.

We visited the New York Stock Exchange; I remember looking down from the
observation balcony on the trading floor and being amazed at the traders
running around. (My ticket, which I faithfully glued into my journal,
indicates that our tour was between 15:15 and 16:00, the last forty-five
minutes of the trading day.) At some point my father asked my brother
Willy, who was three-and-a-half at the time (younger than Calvin is now)
whether he understood the stock exchange and he thought for a moment and
said, "Statue of Liberty makes sense to me."

Our last tourist stop in Manhattan that afternoon was the observation
deck at the top of 2 World Trade Center. I have vague memories of the
plaza between the Twin Towers, the building's lobby, the elevators, and
of the indoor observation deck itself and the view it provided. (My
memories of the plaza are muddled with "The City of New York vs. Homer
Simpson" and my recent visit to the memorial garden that has replaced
the site of the towers and the plaza between them.) I included my ticket
stub in my journal, but other notes indicate that there should be a
World Trade Center brochure that is no longer present.

We ate supper at The Famous Bari pizzeria a few blocks away. I remember
a narrow pizza shop along a narrow street. Before we started eating my
father was away from the table but our pizza had arrived, so my mother
grabbed a garlic shaker and dumped it on my father's pizza. He thought
it was great.

Armed with the address on the business card carefully preserved in my
journal, I looked up the address when I returned and saw that I'd been
within a block at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, and that it's only
a few blocks from the World Trade Center. Google Maps mentions vaguely
that a business with a similar name might be located at that address,
but Street View shows no trace of that particular pizzeria.

In addition to the specific sites I mentioned above, I remember narrow
streets, traffic and horns, towering buildings, tiny parking lots, and
grates over utility vaults. Every time I take Calvin somewhere I wonder
how much he's going to remember about it, and sometimes I try to
intentionally jog his memory by providing photos, but ultimately he'll
get whatever he wants to out of the experience, and all I can do is
provide it and hope for the best.